I really don't see the "prescience". Movies about an apocalyptic future are nearly a dime a dozen and considering how far silent running shot from the mark on almost anything of how our present world is, it's hardly brilliant. The earth is still here and full of life, more of us than ever live on it and despite this, all major metrics of human development are better than they have ever been. Yes, we still have many environmental problems, but solutions are at least possible for them and our planet is far from the hell so many movies and books of the 70's predicted for the early 21st century. Also, in at least some ways, we're even improving certain things in interesting ways, or at least working towards doing so.
Climate change is something to worry about constructively, but many of its worst consequences still exist only as predictive models no matter how much many here would like to twist otherwise and by no objective, reasoned measure are we living in an ecological hell that's in any way worse than it was in the 70s, never mind in the fantasy future worlds predicted by literature and film from that era. If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
I know that a bit of optimism isn't fashionable among a certain segment of the population, but it's if anything at least more realistic and accurate than the ridiculous notion of calling Silent Running prescient.
Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
Good science fiction is often more about the present than about the future: a projection of current problems into an amplified version of reality.
Sometimes that device gets overdone: 2004 Battlestar Galactica felt to me carrying much of 9/11 background.
Silent Running is far from alone in the pessimist outlook. It's funny that, living in a civilization so much indebted to technology, the stories that we keep telling ourselves about it are so negative.
We've accepted that as a given. I recently enjoyed a lot Altered Carbon, that has as a premise a technology that provides immortality for the masses. Well, guess what: that good guys are trying to destroy it. Because reasons.
Also the cities seem like a shithole, not sure why.
I really recommend you give the trilogy of books in which that story happens a try. They go into a lot more detail about how the Protectorate (all the worlds colonized by Earth's UN government) is and delve a lot into the practical economic details of different characters lives. This includes minor characters. I'm not sure how badly the TV series mangled the essential backstory and plot of the books, since I disliked it nearly from the start, but in the books, nobody is opposed to immortality for the masses and though there are a lot of grim details about life in that future, for most people it's described as being more or less decent. The governments of the different worlds offer social welfare, economic freedom, religious freedom and so forth. There are economic booms and busts but overall life isn't absolutely shitty. People also generally get sleeve insurance (something like health insurance but for having a new body on standby), nanotechnology to conserve health from birth in babies and so forth.
In many ways it's like a futuristic version of life for many in the developed world today, except that governments in the books tend to be self serving, often corrupt oligarchies and the justice systems are often draconian and corrupt too... Oh wait.
> If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
There's a bit of a y2k issue here: things have got a lot better because a lot of work has been done. But getting the work done required political action, which required scare stories.
"If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago."
The Global Living Planet Index graph shows a significant decline in the population abundance of vertebrate species from 1970 to the present, indicating a substantial loss in global biodiversity.
> Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.
Y'know what else is mostly crap? Forgetting that things changec because of projected problems like this. Go look at any movie from the late 1960s showing the LA skyline and just look at the smog. Car manufacturers would never have attended to that problem without being forced to by publically popular legislation. There are many other examples here that have avoided "ecological hell" and post-facto "well, nothing bad happened" analyses are mostly crap because something did happen, except it gets conveniently forgotten by a culture that has the memory of a goldfish.
Climate change is something to worry about constructively, but many of its worst consequences still exist only as predictive models no matter how much many here would like to twist otherwise and by no objective, reasoned measure are we living in an ecological hell that's in any way worse than it was in the 70s, never mind in the fantasy future worlds predicted by literature and film from that era. If anything, rivers, oceans and other landscapes are now cleaner and greener in many places than they were several decades ago.
I know that a bit of optimism isn't fashionable among a certain segment of the population, but it's if anything at least more realistic and accurate than the ridiculous notion of calling Silent Running prescient.
Fashionable nihilism about the world via contrived comparisons may be fun for dramatic dinner party conversation, but as an objective means of analyzing the world, it's mostly crap.